Bugzilla – Bug 150744
Installer should not format external drives
Last modified: 2006-07-31 14:45:03 UTC
If Yast finds /dev/hda and /dev/sda, then it will install (and format, if neccessary) SL on /dev/sda. This can result in data loss for external USB- and Firewiredrives. Please do a check, if /dev/sda is an usb-storage or ohci1394 device, befor suggesting to format the disk.
Thomas: This really would make sense for an enhancement, internal drives should take preference. I'm not sure if this would affect only the partitioner...?
In my humble opinion, it's not an enhancement - it's a major bug. A friend of me lost a whole external backup disk completely when Windows just formatted it when he tried to reinstall it. It would be really good to not have that problem in suse.
Well... its never bad if people know what they are doing, specially when formatting harddisks - that's why everything is shown up in a summary (with large red letters in that case). So this is no major bug, but an enhancement in my opinion. In that fashion, the next one could complain that his internal disk was formatted... YaST is only making a proposal here, I can impress with Microsoft the user would not even see what's happening but a funny animation on the screen while his data is getting exiled ;)
As many systems are not able to boot from an USB-disk (I don't even know, if YaST can install on it...), I consider it as a clear bug. YaST should not suggest a non working solution, that's all.
If I get it right, there's no open question to Marcel here - so this bug shouldn't be in NEEDINFO state...
I'm setting bugs which contain no new comments to NEED on order to handle them better on my listings. So I'd appreciate it if you would not change the setting without providing something useful - thanks. The issue adressed in this report is furthermore adressed in another bug as the partitioner in Beta4 is generally kind of broken. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 151947 ***
I disagree that this issue is covered in 151947. That bug talks about completely different things.
OK we can let this one go its way seperately. There was a related issue about hotplugging devices during the installation falsifying the later fstab, but I cannot find the bug right now.
I can do things different for external drives as soon as hwinfo is telling me which drive is external and which one is internal. As long as I do not have this information I see no way to do what is requested. (and no, I will not add code that decides about external/internal drives based on the bus type, since this is not reliable).
hwinfo 12.13 sets a 'hotpluggable' flag: (hd_t *)->is.hotpluggable
Ok, will honour that after 10.1.
Reopen for work in SL 10.2
Proposal tries now to avoid suggestion of hotpluggable disks for instalation.